Colonial Sustainability: Tracing the Sustainability Industry’s Ecocidal Lineage from the Doctrine of Discovery

Abstract

The concept of “sustainable development” fuelling today’s sustainability industry may be traced back to the turn of the 14th century. The Holy Roman Empire’s imperialistic expansions into Africa and the Canary Islands eventually morphed into a burgeoning capitalist European colonial project, which then sought to undo the very environmental harms it had wrought through colonial extraction from further colonial domination and social control. Post-World War II “peace” efforts birthed supranational entities that continue to impose white supremacist epistemological systems, frames, and standards on the neocolonised Global South. These impositions led to the creation of the contemporary sustainability industry, enabling the obfuscation of Global North expansionism through the application of white supremacist, Western-centric sustainability rhetoric. The cultural evolution of “sustainability” moves steadily apace as decolonial counternarratives struggle to materialise amid active silencing and stamping out by the mechanisms of coloniality.